


Inevitable

by Khismer



Category: Homestuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-20
Updated: 2011-06-20
Packaged: 2017-10-20 14:10:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/213597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Khismer/pseuds/Khismer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No matter how fast you run, it surrounds you. The only way to escape it is to embrace it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inevitable

Your name is Liyana and you do not want to die.

Well, you reason, nobody really _wants_ to die.  
Then again, most people have their deaths thrust upon them, something quick, or at the very least, unstoppable once set in motion.  
Most people don't find themselves on a dying planet, the blood of those both high and low surrounding them, crushed by meteors or the life pushed from them by the screaming.

The scream.

It shakes its way into your core, wriggling inside you like something dirty, spiking into every nerve and making you nauseous from the contact.  
But it's not too bad yet. You're green; you have more time than some, not that it'll matter.  
(In the end, the hemospectrum never mattered that much anyway. There'll barely be minutes between the maroons and the violets.)

Where were you?  
Ah, yes. You were attempting to write a note. Attempting.

You frown at the writing. You meant to scribe something heartfelt, for friends, for future generations-if any even manage to survive this, which you are beginning to doubt.

Instead, two words are scratched into the paper: ' _I tried._ '

'I tried'. What does that even mean?

Maybe you could figure it out if you could breathe right, but every bit of air feels warm and sticky and heavy and you feel like you're going to _drown_ in blood.

She's dead, anyway.  
The thought comes unbidden, and it makes you _ache_. You don't _want_ it to be true, but you don't want _any_ of this to be true.

She's lower, much lower-in fact, of the lowest.  
The only comfort you can have there is that she must have died quickly, not even realizing what was going on, not seeing the terrified faces or the despairing keening of the dying outside her hive.

Except, you remember, she wasn't at her hive.

Now why would you remember that at a time like this?  
Why should you care if she was at combat training, or strolling down the beach near where that funny boy with the wild hair lives, or doing an acrobatic flipping pirouette for that matter when she dies?

And then you go cold.  
Oh, that's right.  
She was with her matesprit.

You _like_ her matesprit. It sometimes seemed as though you were the only two non-violent trolls on all of Alternia.

You glance to the other room, where you can just make out the green-splattered white of your lusis, crushed by the impact of a meteor.

Would Pip's lusis be dead by now? You wonder.

You glance back to the note. 'I tried.'  
And slowly, you crumple it in your hand.

Normally, you'd say it was suicide, but since you're going to die anyway-well, why not go together?

So you run. The stairs that take you out of the burrow are, miraculously, unblocked, and you are able to flee your hive in little time.

You have to crawl through a hole in Pip's doorway left by the front door splintering, but you make it through okay, only getting a gash on your arm in the process.

Pip is sobbing when you find her.

She's holding on to Vee-poor, successful, _maroon_ Vee-who looks about as far from graceful in death than she ever was in life.

Her long hair is matted with her own blood, and there are scratches down her face. It looks like she clawed at herself in her last moments-perhaps her death was not as painless as you'd assumed.

When she turns her face up to you, you see that there are blue tracks down her cheeks, as well as a dried red splotch on her neck-presumably from where she bent down to hold her matesprit.

She does not release her hold on Vee, but neither does she back away from the contact of your hand on her shoulder, or flinch away when you drop down into a kneeling position and draw her into an embrace.

“Lee,” she croaks, in a voice raspy from overuse.  
You don’t say anything, even as you shift so as not to unbalance Vee's corpse, still in Pip's arms. You feel like you’ve forgotten how to speak, or even breathe—but no, wait, instead it feels like your chest is being crushed, all the air forced out.

 

You’ve been holding on but you know its inevitable, because you can see a trickle of bright blue leak from her nose, and you’d know you were not far from that even if you couldn’t feel a faint ‘pop’ in the back of your skull as the world starts to blur around you.

She claps her hands over your ears anyway, and the both of you hold on.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in, what, an hour? Around that time. I’ve been trying to get a handle on some fantrolls, so I wrote this in the process.  
> Fun facts: if Liyana had survived, her strife specibus would have been been syringe-kind. Pip and Vee were not their original names, nor their full names. Still working out the kinks there, but Vee's name is something like Vr-nen-un), with the nickname being based off a verbal tic (the habit of hiccuping, frequently) instead of a shortened form of the name. They’re around seven or eight and a half sweeps old, Liyana is around five and a half sweeps.  
> I've got a bunch more aspects of their characters that don't fit in, though, and so I may have to write something else to encompass this.


End file.
